Rereads are marked with an asterisk, like so*.
The title poem is excellent. Blind re-envisions the myth of St. Oran, who rose from the grave and denied the existence of Heaven and Hell, into a kind of atheist messiah who preaches an ethic that lauds the feminine realms of love and the material world. The "Other Poems," though, do not excel in terms of poetic language and thematic depth.
Kadare recounts his childhood in an Albanian city during WWII. The young narrator is exposed to much violence, which he renders dreamlike through his insistence on personifying objects, including the stones that make up the city. He uses the environment to conjure a gloomy, claustrophobic mood. Kadare also pays close attention to the treatment of women, portraying the misogyny that animates the occupying armies and Albanian culture. Kadare has a great gift for language, and his prose is both poetic and readable.
The initial binary Heschel establishes between space and time is intriguing, but is not well-developed. Heidegger's idea that humans are time would be an interesting complement to Heschel's thought. In addition, the spiritual world Heschel imagines is both anti-material and exclusively male, which I find repulsive.